Many people do not have sustainable access to safe drinking water. An estimated 1.1 billion people do not have access to an improved source of drinking water with an estimated 84 percent of them living in rural areas. Further, an estimated 70 percent of rural dwellers do not have access to piped water in the home. These rural dwellers often hand-carry water to their homes in various containers. In such cases, the source of the water may be from a river, lake, or shallow (hand-dug) well. It is common for these water sources to yield unsafe drinking water. Meanwhile, urban dwellers without access to piped water may obtain water from delivery trucks and haul it to their homes in various containers. It is not uncommon for water delivered by truck in developing countries to be of unsafe quality. Yet further, the piped water received by many rural or urban dwellers in developing countries is often of questionable quality.
Various approaches and devices have been developed to address the issue of providing safe drinking water to those people without access to an improved source of drinking water. One approach involves adding chlorine to disinfect water. Although chlorine chemical treatment is relatively inexpensive and effective, it imparts an off-taste to water and requires continual replenishment of the chlorine chemical supply. Another approach uses 2-liter plastic bottles to provide disinfection through use of sunshine and raised water temperature. Bottles are filled with water and left in the sunshine for at least six hours to accomplish disinfection. Because 2-liter bottles are nearly ubiquitous throughout the world and there are no chemicals or energy costs, this approach is relatively affordable. However, an impediment to its use relates to the time delay for disinfection to occur since people must plan ahead and recycle bottles daily to maintain a safe water supply. This requires recognizing the importance of safe water and investing the time and effort to achieve it, which makes this a less than ideal approach. Another approach uses biosand filters. These also require significant time, effort and commitment on the part of the user. Still yet another device is an inexpensive ceramic water filter that uses a colloidal silver lining to accomplish disinfection. The design uses a plastic bucket with a clay filter that removes larger particles, but the colloidal silver lining is necessary to achieve successful treatment.
Accordingly, improved approaches and systems are needed in the art for reliably producing water safe for consumption and use by people.